A sunny month in the south and east

Figure 1

A very sunny month especially across more southern and eastern areas of both Scotland, Wales and England, but always cloudier the further northwest that you went, and more generally over Ireland (fig 1). The sunshine figures are for some reason always more reliably reported in a SYNOP report from a AWS than are rainfall totals, as you can see from the Rx column (fig 2) most stations are at 100%. Jersey is still miles out in front this month, with over 240 hours of sunshine, being an Island in a relatively cold English Channel does help a bit in that department. There are several other chasing stations who also might crack the 200 hour barrier this month, and today might help in that regard at Camborne.

Figure 2

These sunshine totals are high but they don’t look high enough to beat the April of 2015 which was exceptionally sunny across the country (fig 3). ‘Sunniest since 2015’ doesn’t make much of a headline I’m afraid.

Figure 3 – Data courtesy of the Met Office

The Met Office do provide monthly climate statistics for Jersey, so it looks like this April they are currently around 122% of the average, with four days left of the month. I’ve Tweeted the Jersey Met Office to try and find out if they know what the sunniest April on record there, hopefully they will reply, and not by Tweeting ‘yes we do but we are not telling you’.